Wise Old Moon Talks 'Patterns'

Wise Old Moon plays "Day Grifter" from its album "Patterns" in an unplugged performance in our studio in July of 2014.

Wise Old Moon plays "Day Grifter" from its album "Patterns" in an unplugged performance in our studio in July of 2014.

MICHAEL HAMAD, mhamad@courant.comThe Hartford Courant

Wise Old Moon's Connor Millican, 24, wrote songs after late shifts bartending and painting houses. You can almost smell the late-night paint fumes and hear the clinking of glasses on "The Patterns," Wise Old Moon's studio debut, where acoustic guitars, barroom pianos and fiddles weave lines around Millican's laconic delivery. Millican recruited some great local talent — violin player Christian Schrader, percussionist Corey Pane, singer-songwriters James Maple and Kerri Powers and the Meadows Brothers — to do some heavy lifting on the album, which was recorded over the winter at Eric Lichter's Dirt Floor Recording Studio in Chester.

CTNow spoke to Millican about the road to "The Patterns."

CTNow: How long has Wise Old Moon been a thing?

Connor Millican: About two years, but I had been doing a solo thing before that, and I had another band before that. So we got serious with [Wise Old Moon] about two years ago.

CTNow: So for the last two years, how have things progressed? It seems like maybe there are a few different musicians that you've been cycling through.

CM: Yeah, it's been tough because we're not really getting paid to do music full-time, and I'm self-employed. I have a video company I do screen printing out of my house, so I'm kind of one of the few of this cast of characters that is able to do this full-time. So I'm trying to group together as many talented players as I can for each show, really. So at first it was a core group of three, and then like I said we got into the studio and we had some great musicians joining us on that album, and that's when I realized it was time to kind of expand. Since then it's really been the last 10 shows or so with a lot of different people who are more involved in music. The guys who I started out with aren't full-time musicians. So both of them have conflicts and have other things to do first.

We went to Infinity Hall [in Norfolk] to an open mic [in December 2013], they put us on the big stage and we won a competition, and we got the chance to open for Poor Old Shine, and as that progressed we started playing bigger shows and saving up to go and record, that was something that I always wanted to do. It kind of made sense, last winter, and we picked up some new players along the way.

We recorded the album at Dirt Floor Studio in Chester in the winter of 2014. We recorded over about a week and a half. A lot of it was live. It was very natural. It was basically a living room, the fire was going all the time. Eric Lichter produced the album. He did a great job with just kind of letting us do our thing. We knew that we didn't want to have a click track and we didn't want to be wearing headphones. That was kind of the two things that we went in saying to him, and he never wanted to do that either. So it was great to be on the same page with him, and I think that's why we chose to go in there. We knew that he had an organic approach to recording. Some of the people that I've been listening to — Poor Old Shine, Kerri Powers — they've all made records there, and I've loved each one, each in a different way.

CTNow: Tell me about the songs themselves: the process of writing them, the timeframe.

CM: Before I started a business and got serious with the music, I was working as a bartender and a house painter, and a lot of those songs were written after double shifts, at the end of really long days at very early times in the morning, in an apartment in Hartford. "Day Grifter" was written there. One song is called "Money Right," and that song was written about two days before going into the studio. I wanted to have a mixture of things that were fresh, and things that I'd always wanted to record. So it is kind of a mixture of songs, but I thought a lot about the order of them, and I think the way they all kind of sit on the album. It's almost a progression of how recent they were, now that I think about it actually.

CTNow: In the flow of the album sequence?

CM: I think so. Well, because some of the last songs are some of the newer songs that I've written, some of the ones earlier in the album are ones that I wrote when I was in that apartment at 4 a.m., being really quiet. That's the feel of the beginning of the album, it is a pretty quiet album. So maybe it is because I was not trying to keep the neighbors up.

CTNow: So at Arch you're going to play the album in order?

CM: Yeah. We've been working on such interesting new material too, which I'd like to incorporate into the set as well. I think it was tough because I'd never made an album before, and the studio is so different from the live experience, you know? So, like, in a way, ["The Patterns"] really did capture our natural sound, but it didn't capture the live experience. Especially now that we've got this bigger lineup, the live show is a little more energetic. So I'm excited to play the songs a little bit differently than they were recorded on the album. It makes me feel really good about the future of playing these songs and being able to incorporate new musicians and change them up, because I think that's one thing I've always had in mind: to have a dynamic live performance, for people to see us one night, and see us another night, and have a similar experience but know that it's a different set in a way.

CTNow: They can come and see you more than one night and know that they're going to get something good, but it might be a little bit different.

CM: Right. And that's I think a lot easier to achieve with different genres of music, so I think with the players that we have now, it's gonna make that process a lot more fun and interesting. Hopefully the crowd can see that too.

CTNow: So who are you gonna have with you? Tell me the lineup.

CM: I have Dustin and Ian Meadows on drums and electric guitar, Greg Perault is from Elison Jackson, another Connecticut band. He'll be playing upright bass, and Noah Bowden will be on the violin.

Editor's note: This story has been edited from a previous version to remove outdated concert information.